International Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization

Special Issue

Transparency and Ethics in Public Sector Management

  • Submission Deadline: Mar. 30, 2016
  • Status: Submission Closed
About This Special Issue
This special issue publishes only original articles from a wide variety of methodological and disciplinary perspectives concerning ethical issues related to public sector that bring something new or unique to the discourse in their field.

Many organizations, such as Transparency International, European Commission, World Bank or The Heritage Foundation, report corruption indexes for different countries. Similarly, many studies have analysed the empirical determinants of corruption at national level using indexes that measure perceptions rather than actual political corruption. Nevertheless, there is not unambiguous theoretical approach on which to base an empirical model of the causes of corruption, let alone to investigate the causes of corruption. Both the provision of information to citizens and citizens’ ability to monitor their governments play an important role to battle against corruption. In the last years, many governments have increased openness and transparency. The role of budget transparency has increasingly attracted attention from governments and international organizations as a way to give credibility to economic policies, thereby enhancing economic growth. This concern has triggered the development of budget transparency international standards such as the ‘Code of Good Practices on Fiscal Transparency’ (published by International Monetary Fund in 1998 and updated in 2007) or the ‘Best Practices for Budget Transparency’ (published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in 2001). Furthermore, in 2006, the International Budget Partnership, a non-governmental organization, published the Open Budget Index to provide central governments with a systematic measure of their budget transparency level. Despite the growing interest that budget transparency has received in the last decade, empirical studies on its determinants are quite limited. In this sense, information and communication technologies, in general, and E-government, in particular, are seen a suitable means to reduce corruption and to promote transparency. This special issue provides a forum to address these issues.

1. Causes and consequences of corruption
2. Budget transparency
3. Values, actions and behaviours of politicians
4. E-government
5. Social media
6. Public engagement in public policies
7. Monitoring public sector management
8. Government relationships and public accountability
9. Budgetary oversight
10. Societal accountability